Lia McKnight is a Perth-based artist who seamlessly moves between drawing, textiles, installation and sculpture. McKnight’s beautifully strange, yet eerily familiar works confuse the boundaries between the ‘natural’ and the ‘personal’—an idea that she and eleven other artists explore in a new group show at the Fremantle Arts Centre.

Mum’s recurring complaint is that dad never finishes anything. There’s a half-built brick barbecue at the end of the garden that in twenty years has never seen a hotplate, let alone a sausage or steak. It was the same too with the model train layout he built for me as a kid, which never sported truck nor track. But I didn’t realise till now that not finishing things could be a good thing, a helpful trick to keep your creativity on track.

More difficult than knowing where to begin is knowing when to stop. Pieces of writing we’re working on. Bad relationships. Eating. But when it comes to finding the best ending for a creative work, the perfect solution might be right under our noses.

There are few noble professions left unspoiled by controversy. Take the all too common occurrence of pyromaniac firefighters, corrupt cops and sinful priests. But with librarians, it’s different. As Michelle Astrid Francis shows us, in her first essay for Rabbit Hole, your average librarian is not only guardian of the stacks, but also a gatekeeper to imaginary worlds beyond.